Giving the mystery a name
More from Mark Vernon. And more again. I’m still not convinced though.
But this is the over-riding issue, it seems to me, in the atheists’ dismissal of God: if they really want to be conclusive then they must address the best ideas of God available, the criterion for that being those of the great theologians…Unfortunately, or irritatingly, though, they will find that the best theologians say that God is not ultimately amenable to the kind of analysis they want to apply. For the very simple reason that God is beyond human comprehension, else not God. This is not to say that reason has no role to play in theology: it’s primary purpose is to do away with false gods.
But if ‘God’ is beyond human comprehension, then how can (human) reason do away with false gods? How can it do one but not the other – or if it can’t do one, how can it do the other? How can you know this is counterfeit, and this is a fraud, and this is no good, if you don’t know what the authentic version is?
And there’s also the wearyingly familiar problem, which I apologize for repeating, that if ‘God’ is beyond human comprehension, then why do people say things about it at all? If it’s beyond human comprehension – why doesn’t that mean that there is just nothing at all for humans to say about it? It still seems like a cheat. ‘God’ is beyond comprehension so it’s ‘not ultimately amenable to the kind of analysis atheists want to apply,’ but it is amenable to the kind of analysis theists want to apply. How can that not look like a shell game? Not to mention the pesky fact – again, much repeated – that many people do claim to comprehend god and make all sorts of factual claims about it, especially about the way it wants us to behave and not behave, which people it wants us to treat badly, how hard to hit children, and the like. In that sense the theologians’ beyond comprehension god is beside the point. The problem with religion is all the claims that people do make about god, so it’s in a way irrelevant to point out that theologians mean a different kind of god.
Stephen Law comments here and here. He answers the ‘God is beyond human comprehension else not God’ move this way:
But now here’s my question: what is the difference between the atheist who admits there is indeed a fascinating mystery about why there is anything at all, a mystery to which they do not have the answer, and Vernon’s theist who says there’s a mystery about why there is anything at all, and calls this mystery “God”? Surely the difference is entirely trivial and semantic?
It seems so to me. There’s this [ ] that we don’t comprehend, called ‘God,’ or there are a lot of things we don’t comprehend, and because we don’t comprehend them we don’t give them names. There’s an unknown unknown; let’s either call it ‘God’ or not call it anything. There’s a mystery about why there is anything at all; let’s call it ‘God’; no, let’s not give it a name. That does indeed seem like a trivial difference. (I think Stephen meant to say ‘anything’ instead of ‘nothing’ in the theist version: I think the two mysteries are meant to be the same mystery rather than different mysteries.)
Update: Yes, Stephen meant ‘anything,’ so I’ll change the wording, noting it here because commenters have quoted the first version.
Well, I’ve about come to the conclusion that it’s pointless to keep trying to have a sensible dialog with people like Vernon, who are just in love with the idea of mystery for its own sake, it seems to me. No matter how much you patiently explain to them that there’s no point in giving a complete mystery (which is what they claim their god, or the “condition of the possibility of existence of the universe”) a name, they still insist on doing it. (I wish they would have a look some day at the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching: “the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao” — so stop naming it, for Pete’s sake.)
They keep doing it just because they are in love with the sound of the word “god.” I really think the old logical positivists had something: words like “god” have an emotional meaning, and that’s all. And that’s why they keep insisting on their “god” being all-wise, so we stupid humans have to obey “god’s” commands — such as how hard to hit our kids, as you say. It’s because when they’re mad as hell at their kids and hit them, they want the emotional comfort of thinking that “god” has told them they should do it. Or when they march off to war, they want “god” to be behind the slaughter. Emotional meaning — nothing else.
I tend to agree with you on this one. The problem with the “wholly other” God, beyond all human comprehension, etc. is no more amenable to theistic analysis than to atheistic one – and one could probably argue that a being so wholly beyond our understanding isn’t amenable to worship either. I think Mark Vernon contrasts two extreme positions here: an empiricist-minded atheist one and the one of a subset of Protestant theology (which for some reason Vernon identifies with “the (best) theologians), but there’s something in between as well.
I would, however, agree with Vernon’s sentiment that if an atheist wants to attack the God question (rather than, say, the effects of religion), s/he should pick the best one available. Same principle of charity goes for theists, of course.
It seems to me that if there are people who believe in this unfathomably mysterious god, then their real concern ought not to be with atheists, but with all the followers of organised religion who claim to know exactly what god wants us to do.
Something along the lines of “How dare you believe in something I know you can’t possibly understand…!”
I think OB and Law are both being overgenerous! I feel that ‘mystery’ as used by agnostotheists, the ‘spiritual’, and other crypto-Diabolicals is meant in the sense of that which is Mystery-in-essence, the Unknowable, rather than in the sense of something potentially solvable through rational investigation. So yes, there’s a big gap between the ‘atheist’s mystery’ and the ‘agnostic’s mystery’.
The atheist sees the known unknowns and recognizes the existence of the unknown unknowns, and either leaves it at that or seeks knowledge. Calling this a ‘mystery’ is a different level of thinking altogether – it’s a presumption of the Unknowable (note capitalization and all that implies). This thing-we-call-God is that ‘Unknowableness’.
As to picking the best thinking when engaging with ‘the God question’, that’s all well and good when playing with concepts of God (and can be very rewarding… at least as an intellectual exercise) but such discussion is always question-begging. Is there any reason to assume that anything is ‘Unknowable’?
OK Merlijn, which version of god is the best one available? Is this version something about which theists are in general agreement?
Yesterday I once again came across Wittgenstein’s metaphor about the purpose of philosophy being ‘to shew the fly the way out of the bottle’. Until we can pin down the shape of the theist’s bottle it is pretty difficult to emancipate the insect.
JonJ has the right sow by the ear.
Mysticism for its own sake is just codswallop, followed by bullshit all the way down …….
As long as the religious retreat into this handwaving obscurantism, they are safe from one thing – they CANNOT have a debate with those who have even a smattering of a scientific training.
Which then runs smack up against the OTHER lot, who claim that “god” is real, and present, and intervenes, etc – but still not detectable (of course).
The most charitable thing one can say is that they are seriously deluded.
As long as the religious sit in their little corners and chunter on in an Eagletonish fashion I’ve got no problem with them. It’s when they start telling me what I can and can’t do that I start to object and when they start sending death threats to women who dare to disagree with them I get really upset. As Ophelia makes clear more than once (in fact more than several hundred times)the kind of God that Vernon accuses atheists of not dealing with is not the kind of God most people – especially the nasty ones – deal with either.
God is beyond human comprehension, else not God
So are theologians liars or idiots?
MikeS-
I think the principle of charity as applied here would mean that the “best” God hypothesis is the one you think best. Or at the very least a philosophically worked-out one, whether the God of classical theism (Swinburne, Plantinga) or process theism (Whitehead, Hartshorne) or some version of deism.
The reason is that the “God that people really believe in” which is talked about a lot here is a red herring. People do not believe in a static, clear and distinct idea – their conception of God may vary from time to time, not to speak from person to person, etc. So you’re dealing with a genuine unknowable here – at least to the extent that it is impossible to avoid strawman arguments. When dealing with the worked-out, defensible, specific concepts of God that have been proposed, it is at least a matter of common knowledge what the other side is saying.
In other words, suppose I am arguing – on paper, on the web, or in my head – against philosophical materialism. What I can’t do is take an “average” version of philosophical materialism which I _think_ most philosophical materialists hold. Because it is likely to be a strawman, and at the very least to be an incoherent version of the thing – and an argument against an inferior version of a philosophical standpoint has no weight. Rather, what I should do is look for the version that seems to be the _least_ open to criticism and try to knock that one down. Suppose I find that Dr. Brain’s brilliant statement of philosophical materialism contains a mistake which I think is nonetheless not fatal – the position as a whole can be salvaged. I should salvage it and then knock it down.
Because once you knocked down the most coherent, specific, clear statement of a philosophical idea, you need not worry about the inferior versions of it.
Why should we call that which is beyond our comprehension “God”? We don’t call inifinitessimally small numbers “Santa Claus”. Surely “God” is exactly the wrong label for such things? Since it is beyond our comprehension we can draw no moral lessons from it (whatever ‘it’ is), nor can we even know if it exists, or what it would mean for it to exist.
So it just looks here like what our theist is tryong to do is use an unprovable metaphysical question (there does/doesn’t exist a something that is beyond our comprehension) to bolster their belief in some kind of god (defined conventionally). If the theists wants to call this unknowableness “God” that is their perogative, but in no way does it establish any kind of identity between this concept (which might be better represented as ‘null’, or ‘NaN’, or some similar symbol) and the conventional, or even minimal definition of god.
If we want to prove god exists by this sort of technique, why not call the decimal limit of pi “God”, or the real number line, or 1/0?
But Merlijn, that doesn’t follow. Surely it would have to be the premises upon which the hypothesis rests you would have to challenge in order for you to dismiss all versions of it?
Merlijn – I imagine most atheists would consider a minimally specified deism/first cause as the best hypothesis for god – but of course they would then regard it as an utterly irrelevant question precisely because it has no further ramifications in the world. So I don’t think the best argument for god we could imagine actually helps the theist – it wouldn’t change anything about our approach to the world if it were true, but would devastate the religious convictions of most theists.
If we want to prove god exists by this sort of technique, why not call the decimal limit of pi “God”, or the real number line, or 1/0?
This is the same conflation OB and Law made: we’re talking mystery or Mystery, unknowable or Unknowable – the merely unknown, in fact, or the grandiosely ineffable. The decimal limit of pi it unknowable in a purely prosaic sense; similarly, a materialist sees consciousness and the birth of the universe as mysteries in a prosaic sense of ‘things [as yet] unknown’. The theist (or agnostotheist) seems a capital-M Mystery – something believed, sans evidentce, to be necessarily capital-U Unknowable.
I may (!) be throwing myself open to accusations of strawmannism here.
I think 1/0 is closest to that – we have defined it as not meaning anything, just as we’ve defined god as that which we cannot know.
PM: I think the relative acceptability of a deistic God or an otherwise very abstract prime mover to atheists depends on some unspoken philosophical premises (materialism, perhaps also antirealism concerning universals). But if this very minimal hypothesis could be shown to be incoherent, logically impossible, etc. – then the more elaborate versions of theism are in big trouble, too. However, should it be shown to be rationally defensible (and I don’t think we can get any further than that, anyway) given a certain philosophical framework, it does not necessarily vitiate other versions of theism. For the purpose of attacking theism, though, a very minimalist version of it serves nicely.
Outeast: not in this case. Demolishing the clearest and best statement of _a_ God hypothesis would necessarily demolish less clear, well-articulated versions as well. It wouldn’t be relevant to other versions of God hypotheses but I don’t think one cannot even distinguish common premises to all of them. Plantinga’s classical God, Hartshorne’s neoclassical one, the Deistic deity and the ten-meter tall walking lightbulb of Jack Chick tracts all differ so much from each other in their philosophical assumptions etc. that I’m not sure it makes sense (from a philosophical point of view) to all oppose them under “theism” against “atheism”.
In all seriousness, I don’t think anyone suggests that ‘that which we cannot know’ is an adequate definition of God – merely that this is one of His qualities. As the Good Old Vat puts it, ‘omnipotent, eternal, immense, incomprehensible, infinite in intellect and will, and in every perfection’. Nicely put, actually.
Incidentally, in that same document the G.O.V. ties itself in knots over this incomprehensible thing:
‘The same Holy Mother Church holds and teaches that God, the beginning and end of all things, can be known with certitude by the natural light of human reason … nevertheless, it has pleased His wisdom and goodness to reveal Himself and the eternal decrees of His will to the human race in another and supernatural way… [Even] those things, which in divine things are not impenetrable to human reason by itself, can, even in this present condition of the human race, be known readily by all with firm certitude and with no admixture of error. Nevertheless, it is not for this reason that revelation is said to be absolutely necessary, but because God in His infinite goodness has ordained man for a supernatural end, to participation, namely, in the divine goods which altogether surpass the understanding of the human mind…’ etc etc.
Sheesh.
Merlijn,
Demolishing the clearest and best statement of _a_ God hypothesis would necessarily demolish less clear, well-articulated versions as well.
So how are you defining ‘clearest and best’? Obviously not ‘most essential’, since that is what PM suggested (ie First Cause); so how?
If I wanted to do a Dawkins and trash the Abrahamic concept of God, where would I find the ‘clearest and best’ argument – the one which, refuted, would carry all others with it?
And if there is no such argument, where does that leave your point?
Didn’t I answer that in reply to MikeS already? As I said, I think PM’s minimalist version does the trick at least as far as negative criticism is concerned: demolish it, and you demolish theism. It’s just that the converse does not go: showing a minimal God hypothesis to be rationally defensible does not mean more elaborate ones are rationally indefensible. They may be, or not. But the deistic version does serve the purpose of really focusing on things that can be considered essential to God.
showing a minimal God hypothesis to be rationally defensible does not mean more elaborate ones are rationally indefensible.
I’m puzzled – did anyone suggest this? I thought the only claim was that showing a minimal God hypothesis to be rationally defensible (if it is!) does not mean more elaborate ones are rationally defensible – combined with a claim that there is no point in going on to the more elaborate hypotheses until the core is shown to be reasonable.
Oddly enough the start of the Catholic definition of “god” given above: “the beginning and End of all things” might be a good place to start.
If you can get the religious to agree to that definition, then the physical scientists could (will) have a field-day!
Anyway, this is not going anywhere. Here, though, is some concrete research on the subject.
“‘that which we cannot know’ is…merely that this is one of His qualities…’omnipotent, eternal, immense, incomprehensible, infinite in intellect and will, and in every perfection'”
So we can’t know anything about God, oh, except that He is omnipotent, eternal, immense, and ‘infinite in intellect and will, and in every perfection’, ah, that kind of unknowable.
“I’m puzzled – did anyone suggest this?”
I took it as implied in PM’s post – perhaps carelessly so, as he wrote “it wouldn’t change anything about our approach to the world if it were true, but would devastate the religious convictions of most theists.”, rather than “shown to be true”.
ah, that kind of unknowable
Exactly: unknowable in that sense, all snark aside. Unknowable needn’t mean ‘we can’t know anything about him’.
“No matter how much you patiently explain to them that there’s no point in giving a complete mystery…a name, they still insist on doing it.”
That’s certainly how it strikes me. It’s ironic, in a way – if they just wanted to say ‘there’s a mystery’ or ‘there are things about the universe that we don’t know’ (with or without the addition of ‘and we never will’) I wouldn’t dream of denying it. It’s the damn name that’s the problem. We should start calling it Susan: that might make clearer why it’s such a stumbling block. ‘God’ isn’t just some sort of X-equivalent or place-holder, it’s a name, with a history, and a million competing definitions, many of which are very dangerous. The unknown is one thing and ‘God’ is another.
“But this is the over-riding issue, it seems to me, in the atheists’ dismissal of God: if they really want to be conclusive then they must address the best ideas of God available, the criterion for that being those of the great theologians…Unfortunately, or irritatingly, though, they will find that the best theologians say that God is not ultimately amenable to the kind of analysis they want to apply. For the very simple reason that God is beyond human comprehension, else not God. This is not to say that reason has no role to play in theology: it’s primary purpose is to do away with false gods.”
This just begs all kinds of questions.
For starters, declaring a problem to be rationally insoluble assumes that we already know enough about it to make such a call. That is, we would have to know something about God in order to know what we don’t know. Otherwise, how to justify the contention that God can’t be rationally analyzed? But there’s a real problem here if the whole concept of God is resistant to analysis in the first place. The idea that God will not submit to rational inquiry seems to imply that any statement about God, including the statement that God is beyond rational analysis, would have to be rejected as meaningless.
We’d also need to define what would count as “knowledge” of God straightaway. Without such a working definition, there just isn’t any point in even talking about whether such knowledge is attainable.
“But now here’s my question: what is the difference between the atheist who admits there is indeed a fascinating mystery about why there is anything at all, a mystery to which they do not have the answer, and Vernon’s theist who says there’s a mystery about why there is nothing at all, and calls this mystery “God”? Surely the difference is entirely trivial and semantic?”
S. Law asks a good question, but I think there is a difference. In fact, there seem to be at least two differences. First, for the theist, there actually isn’t a mystery at all, since he already knows that God did it. Second, there’s a difference of motivation. The atheist or agnostic really does want to know what we already undestand about the universe in order to determine what we still need to learn. There’s an insistance on open-ended inquiry without foreordained conclusions. The theist, on the other hand, wants to stifle inquiry before it can ever begin. Real inquiry may not lead to his pre-determined conclusion, and is therefore to be replaced by sham inquiry.
The bottom line is that there IS a profound difference. It’s a distinction between those who really do want to learn something about the world, and those who only want confirmation of what they already think they know.
Phil
OB,
Your idea has merit, but would enormously complicate any projected revival of “Susan and God.”
One more question begged by M. Vernon would be how exactly we determine who these “great theologians” are. Are they defined in advance as the ones who think God is beyond rational analysis?
Phil
“For starters, declaring a problem to be rationally insoluble assumes that we already know enough about it to make such a call.”
Just so. It’s the same question again – how can human reason do one but not the other? If Susan is beyond human comprehension, how can we comprehend enough to know and assert that? How can all these people know and say so much about the unknowable?
Susan no good. Drat. Em…Betsy? Yes, let’s go with Betsy.
Actually, I think there may be at least one candidate for the “best” theological exponent of theism: Aquinas. At least, he’s comparatively clear and analytically-minded, compared with the wafflers that abound these days.
If you look at his thoughts on reason and revelation, which can be found at the beginning of the Summa Theologiae and elsewhere, he prettly clearly lays out the view that some things about god are knowable by reason and others require revelation; there is also a third category of things knowable both by reason and revelation. Of course, there are problems with his view: the things he thinks can be known by reason are mostly, if not entirely, not true, and the things that are allegedly knowable only by revelation are merely parts of the content of Christian culture, and of no particular import to non-Christians. He simply ignored any culture other than his own. (A stance that is still pretty popular.)
Not to mention the fact that the very notion of ‘revelation’ is surely at least highly problematic. Just for a start, revelation is worthless unless it’s universal, and it’s very obviously not universal, so it’s worthless. What good is it for Betsy to ‘reveal’ some truths to a few people and leave all the rest of us to take their word for it? Especially when in ordinary life it’s really not a good idea to take people’s word for things, especially for far-fetched things. In short, revelation just doesn’t cut it.
When I was seven years old, and in primary school at Stratford-sub-castle infants and juniors, the headmaster had a heavy ruler called Betsy. She certainly revealed some truths to a few people. Ahhh.. nostalgia’s not what it used to be.
Merlijn, thank you so much for your contributions in these debates. Without you our discussions would be strangled. I think you are profoundly mistaken in your philosophy, but I greatly admire your knowledge and reasoning – not that my accolades are worth a tinkers cuss!
Ha! Really?! That’s funny. No doubt for the same sort of reason. Not a very goddy or punitive name.
A mighty fortress is our Betsy, a bulwark never failing. Our helper she amid the flood, of mortal ills prevailing.
MikeS – Thanks! And likewise. Discussing stuff around here is always stimulating.
They are removing their god so far as to make her unreachable by any means, empirical, rational, revelational, or otherwise in an apparent attempt to stifle any dissent. But nothing is still nothing no matter how you slice it. “How can you know…,if you don’t know what the authentic version is”? << The authentic version??? lmao ;)
Yes but if nothing is very very very far away, it then becomes something.
Or not.
I have doubt that many people actually fully comprehend the idea of god other than what’s been (sort of) written on her behalf (existence not being a given here!), I mean, how could one? Non-existence would necessatate a pretty imaginitive narrative, even if it were a rudimentary idea, like ‘the grass is greener on the other side of the fence’ rudimentary. Maybe it’s (the ability to form an idea of it) one of Gould’s spandrels — an unfortunate lingering by-product of our hyper-evolved minds?
I vote for ‘Or not.’ :)